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Date: Wed, 15 Feb 2006 12:26:47 -0800 (PST)
From: Marcy Porter
Reply-To: marcyptx@sbcglobal.net
Subject: RE: [ROOTS-L] Citing non-existent places - Polish v Austrian
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My husband's grandfather was 5 years old when he entered the United States with his parents in 1894. They came through the Port of New York, and ended up in Washington County, Texas. When I found the father's naturalization papers in the district court of Washington County, I noticed two things right off - 1) the surname was spelled a different way in each section of the proceding, even though the record was all on one page; and 2) the father renounced his allegiance to the government of Prussia or Austria, or whoever was in power in the native country on the date the father was completing the particular step in the naturalization process.
The different spellings of the name came about because the English-speaking court official, a different one each time, did the best he could to spell what he was hearing my husband's Polish-speaking great-grandfather pronounce. And since he was probably working on a "free-standing" document each time (the record of which was only later transcribed into the bound record book), he couldn't "look farther up the page" to see how the previous recorder had spelled the name.
My husband's grandfather and his family were definitely Polish. My mother-in-law, Texas-born, spoke Polish first (and still speaks it with her sisters), and went to a Polish-speaking school through eighth grade. The area of Europe the family came from changed hands politically so often during the late 1800's and early 1900's that you almost needed a scorecard to keep up. This is reflected in US records of the time, namely that naturalization record, and also census records from 1900 on for this family that report a differently-named birth place on each enumeration.
Several famly members spent years searching ships passenger lists, trying to find when and how this family actually entered the US. I finally found them shortly after the Ellis Island digitized passenger lists were offered on-line. I found them by deliberately mis-spelling my husband's great-grandmother's given name, doing this several different ways, and searching only on her given name. The surname was spelled differenlty, even on that record - the German ship's captain had used his own interpretation of the Polish surname. Even though they had sailed from a German port, a city of origin was recorded, which in their case was their residence before sailing.
I am telling you this story as (I hope) encouragement. Don't give up. If your folks say they are Polish descendants, they probably mean their ancestors were culturally Polish, even though they may not have ever lived under an actual Polish govenment. Remember, too, that US records often reflect the cultural background of the person writing the information down rather than that of the subject of the record (on one census enumeration from south Texas, the enumerator, whose background was German, spelled my Shannons' surname "Schannon"). Be "creative" in spelling your search terms. If you were ever fortunate enough to hear them speak English with their Polish accents, think about how someone of a different culture may have interpreted what they were saying.
My best to you..
Marcy
marcyptx@sbcglobal.net
http://www.geocities.com/marcyptx